Friday, October 14, 2011

by Manoj Das on Sep 27, 2011: The BPM product team is very pleased to announce that BPM Suite 11.1.1.5 Feature Pack is now publicly available. This feature pack includes many significant enhancements and new features. Some of the highlights of this release are:

More Business Friendly

Versions and Snapshots: From process composer, you can create and manage snapshots and see who changed what and when.

Sharing and Collaboration: An enhanced project-level sharing model and collaboration features showing who else is working on the project at any time

Improved Ease of Use: Their is a new project home that makes managing project and its artifacts much more intuitive. Also, improved properties window, editing cues, and many other enhancements targeted at business analysts.

New Business Analyst Features

Documentation (Report) Generation: Generate process documentation as HTML or XML. XML format may be used to create custom outputs.

BPMN 2.0 Collaboration View: Provide a collaboration diagram view based on BPMN 2.0 specification; available in both Composer and Studio.

More Agile

Alter Flow: Alter Flow lets an appropriately privileged user alter the execution of a process by changing the process data and/or moving it to a different activity.

Instance Patching: Change the definition of process and patch in-flight instances to the new definition

More Complete

Broader UCM Integration: Process and task attachments can be easily managed in UCM and related metadata can be set from BPM.

Advanced Services Integration: Some of the more advanced services integration capabilities available in our BPEL product such as message based correlation and ability of a process instance to converse with multiple instances of another process or service are now available in BPMN. (The BPMN features are Correlations and Conversations).

Richer Human Workflow: New features including parametric roles, organization unit based role selection, sticky-user based assignment, and support for 4-eye principle (if a person did one task exclude them from another task) were added.

Richer Process Analytics

Round-trip Simulation – Create simulation scenarios based on run time data.

BI Integration: Process specific views are automatically created on top of the process STAR schema to facilitate analysis using Oracle BI or any other BI tool.

Something for Developers Too

Draft Mode: Develop process incrementally by marking activities as draft or test a process while a service is offline.

Custom Log: Add custom messages to be added to the BPM log and audit trail.

There are tons of materials out there to cover the Oracle ADF topic. However, based on the Open World session from Grant Ronald and Shay Shmeltzer “Getting Started with Oracle ADF: What You Need to Know” I´d like to share some entry points to ease the learning process in that complex theme.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Back at home I can say that Oracle Open World 2011 has been a great conference with more than 45000 attendees – more than ever. Oracle, customers and partner executives focused in their keynotes on the latest technologies for today and the future.

From the first day on I saw a lot of interesting sessions about new products, improvements, hands-on labs and demos. By the way: for all people who will ever have the chance to attend to OOW I really recommend to have a detailed look at the demo grounds. I did spend quite some hours there with a lot of interesting discussions and new impressions. In the field of BPM a special one was the demo pod with the Oracle Process Accelerators. It’s basically a set of Pre-built BPM solutions to automate common business processes. With that approach the main target is to reduce costs and to embed best practices. They will be available as horizontal and industry-specific accelerators, which are extensible to customer-specific needs. The initial release is scheduled for 2012 and it will be accessible from OTN. According to the current plans the first release will focus on Travel Request Management, Document Approval and Public Sector Incident Reporting. See the Oracle BPM Blog for further details. Also nice was the Open World Bookstore where you could buy many Oracle business and technology books. For me a very interesting one was the brand new book Oracle BPM Suite 11g Handbook from Manoj Das, Manas Deb and Mark Wilkins.

In my last post I wrote about the keynotes in the first days. On Wednesday Larry Ellison came out for his second keynote. It was a very exciting one (probably because it was not about Hardware like the opening keynote). First of all he said that after six years of engineering Fusion Apps is now generally available. On one hand this is a very long time – I agree. On the other hand its worth to mention that Fusion Apps is based on a lot of products of the Fusion Middleware Stack – especial SOA. This means that Oracle is not just a producer of large software packages; Oracle also consumes the products we work with! See the product page for more details.

After that Larry Ellison announced two new services. The first one was Oracle Public Cloud, a set of integrated services that provide customers a subscription-based self-service access. Based on SOA and industry standards it’ll allow to run any Java app or any database. Also Fusion Apps can run on-premise and cloud scenarios - Oracle Fusion CRM and HCM can soon be purchased. In terms of security it separates VM and Database per customer.

The second one was the Oracle Social Network – a secure enterprise collaboration tool built into Fusion Applications and integrated with business intelligence and business processes. As a main target it enables customers, partners and colleagues to work together as a team. Like other Fusion Applications it runs on mobile devices as well as on desktop computers.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Welcome to San Francisco and Oracle OpenWorld! This sentence became true since I have the pleasure of attending Oracle Open World 2011. What can I expect? Five days in San Francisco packed with Oracle technologies – from the newest hardware and software products to sneak peeks at what’s coming soon. It started last Sunday on the 4th of October with the keynote of Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO. “The power of parallel-everywhere architecture” was his theme. If you are interested you can watch the Opening Keynote on demand on oracle.com. As part of his speech he announced Oracle Exalytics - a Business Intelligence Machine, which provides extreme in-memory analytics performance.

Yesterday Thomas Kurian, executive vice president Product Development, introduced new software products that deliver the performance of all the engineered systems (Exadata Database, Exalogic Elastic Cloud, SPARC SuperCluster and Exalytics). Furthermore he introduced Oracle Big Data Appliance and announced the release of the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, a centralized console for managing cloud computing systems. By the way: the “c” stands for cloud.

But that’s not all! Before OpenWorld I visited the Oracle Headquarter in Redwood Shores. Of course it was very exciting and I had the chance to discuss customer cases and project solutions in a lot of interesting meetings. Special thanks to Jürgen Kress for organizing the SOA & BPM Partner Advisory Council! There a group of Oracle Ace Directors discussed together with the Oracle product management future directions and improvements. The day after I was able to see how beautiful San Francisco is! Again thanks to Jürgen who arranged a very nice sightseeing tour!!!!